Reflections From a Tour of Public Sector Innovation "In The Wild"

Reflections from a tour of public sector innovation 'in the wild'

Earlier this year iESE hosted Nick Scott, Executive Director of Open Government and Innovation in New Brunswick, Canada and Dr Jules Maitland, founder of All In, a user-experience research and service design firm in New Brunswick, Canada. Here, in an letter to iESE, Nick and Jules reflect on their visit

You lead from the future by exploring the adjacent possible. By going where few public organisations would dare, your teams have created public value most could only dream of. As author Stephen Johnson described it: “The adjacent possibleis a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself”.

Discovery requires a kind of leadership that gets through the uncertainty and hardships of ‘losing sight of shore’. We observed this leadership in several projects. Bracknell Forest Council,for example, was a first mover in the e-card world with its e+ Card. The multi-use card gives holders access to libraries, leisure and the ability to pay for public transport services.

The resulting uses and benefits of having implemented the card are examples of realising the “adjacent possible”. Beyond the obvious uses of the card, Bracknell Forest has demonstrated a number of less obvious uses. The ability to allow vetted users to access the library after hours, variable pricing on parking and incentivising desirable behaviours, such as exercise or recycling, are all made possible by adoption of the e+ Card; adjacent possibilities. As Stephen Johnson noted: “The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations”. Bracknell Forest e+ Card is an example of the mindset and behaviours needed to explore theboundaries of possibility.

Another example is the MySense initiative. Inspired by first-hand experience of watching a loved one’s independence decline alongside their health, MySense is a disruptive innovation in the healthcare space. It provides healthcare providers with information previously unavailable to them and the MySense team have recognised the need to work with healthcare providers to understand the implications of this new information for their clinical decision making, care planning and workflow.

You work with early adopters to accelerate innovation.

Transformative solutions are not immediately implemented at scale. Innovation is an adaptive and iterative process of change and adoption. The Dr. Everett Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve, is a theory that depicts how new technologies are introduced and diffused throughout society. The theory identifies five archetypes in a population along a bell curve from introduction to full scale adoption.

1) Innovators — introduce new concepts, tools, behaviours

2) Early Adopters — join when ideas are fuzzy, technology is buggy. They want to be part of the innovation story

3) Early Majority — join when they see value

4) Late Majority — join when there is plenty of support

5) Laggards — join only when they have to

6) (Bonus) Resistors — maintain the status quo

By working with the Early Adopters, Innovators are able to learn more about their solutions and the problems they aim to solve. The pattern depicted by this theory is the story of culture change and can be applied to organisational transformations like those pursued by the MET Police.

Like most organisations and local authorities, the MET Police was faced with austerity measures following the 2008 recession which created significant business challenges. Faced with a reduction of officers and staff, the MET began a transformation journey. Consisting of a portfolio of 15 change programmes and 80 projects, the Business Change team works with smaller sites and early adopters to test changes and interventions. This approach allows the Business Change team to take a focused “show-don’t-tell” approach; whereby the benefits of an intervention are experienced and demonstrated, thereby reducing the usual friction that occurs in implementation.

You demonstrate agility versus doing agile.

Agile has become the method du jour in many organisations, with no shortage of books and consultants selling “how to do Agile”. This can often result in a performative-approach with a focus on process, roles, tools and steps. By putting residents at the centre of their work, the teams we visited are not simply doing agile, they are being agile.

Along with the majority of the other projects we saw, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelseaproject started with a decision that the status quo was unacceptable. Dissatisfied with existing processes and technologies, the team partnered with Netcall to build the solution themselves. They utilised the low-code application environment to launch the solution within four months of mapping out the process and continue to make iterative improvements to the system in response to issues the public or field officers experience.

The collective sense of ownership of the solution by the team was evident during the visit. Perhaps most significant was the team’s decision to send field officers for training so they themselves will be able to modify the solution. This opens up the potential for them to design/develop other solutions as they see the need arise.

Typically people in the field have to submit “change requests” and wait at the mercy of centralised (and often overstretched) development or innovation teams. Equipping all levels of staff with the skills and tools to develop digital solutions to challenges that they experience or observe, disrupts traditional power dynamics in systems.

It is refreshing to see staff at all levels have autonomy and feel empowered to make decisions to fix problems being faced by the public. It is also encouraging that it was a recurring theme throughout our visit. From Durham Police Constabulary recognising the impact of having a chief inspector who wants staff to “find problems and fix them”, to the Isle of Wight Council advocating to “seek forgiveness, not permission”.

One of our favourite examples came from Lewes andEastbourne Council. The local authority received a call about some bricks which had fallen from a wall. A staff person was dispatched to remove the bricks but instead of moving the bricks and waiting for another department/jurisdiction to fix it, took the initiative to get a labourer to fix the wall.

You amplify impact through inclusion.

Human-Centred Design works from a relatively simple premise: that “the process of design begins with the people being designed for and ends with solutions tailored to meet their needs."

From the framing of the problem being addressed, to the implementation of the developed solution, there are many ways a human-centred approach may be adopted; each introducing varying degrees of engagement of the people being designed for in the design process itself. Human-centred design is a mindset as much as a suite of methods. The projects we visited embodied the human-centred design mindset regardless of whether they were familiar with the model or methods.

Problem Space - Discover insights into the problem The discovery phase of the design process, sometimes referenced as the empathy phase, aims to increase our understanding of the problems we seek to address from the perspective of the people most impacted by them.

As decision makers it can be easy to assume we know what is needed in our communities or organisations. Indeed, it is often expected that we know what needs to be fixed (and how we should fix it). Therefore the decision to engage in discovery work requires a degree of humility and acknowledgement that while we may be experts in our fields, we are not experts in the daily lives of our service users or service providers and there is much we can learn from them. Engaging in discovery work can provide new insights upon which meaningful action can be taken and can also build relationships with the people you serve.

We observed this in Lewis andEastbourne Council, where the incoming leader met business owners and asked what one thing the council could do for them. This allowed efforts to be directed towards a problem impacting a significant portion of the community; demonstrating it was open to listening andtaking action.

Durham Police Constabularyworked closely with stakeholders in the foster care system to understand the underlying factors that contributed to wasted time during an amber alert. This led to a solution that embodied the constabulary’s knowledge of what was needed to bring a child home, while addressing the needs of stakeholders in a way that has had a significant impact on the foster children themselves.

Problem Space - Define the area to focus on There are multiple ways to frame a problem and the way a problem is framed will inform the approach taken to understand and ultimately address it. Most commonly, we adopt an institutional view of a problem. This can lead to solutions that are tightly bound to the priorities and current structure of the institution. Alternative views that lend themselves to more transformative explorations of the problem space are that of the i) user/human and ii) the system.

For example, iESE's CareCubed tackles the institutional problem of the rising cost of care, while addressing the human/userelement of the problem experienced by providers of determining the appropriate plan of care for service users.

By providing the service providers with a tool that helps them get their work done, the CareCubed team incentivises adoption and high-quality data entry, which the institution then benefits from through data-informed decision making. In addition, they have disrupted the systemicissue of market-driven pricing of services, which impacts the industry as a whole.

Solution Space - Develop potential solutions As problem solvers, it is very tempting to run with the first idea from sticky-note to implementation. While our first idea may well be a great idea, we may miss out on a game-changer if we commit prematurely. In addition to the “simple” act of dedicating time to explore the solution space, we can enrich the diversity and quality of our ideas through collective ideation activities to prompt creative thinking and co-creation with service users and service providers.

It would have been very easy for the Mind of My Ownteam, given their years of experience working in the field as social workers, to assume they knew what was needed to help children articulate their needs. Instead, they worked with children to co-produce 90 per cent of the platform.

By opening up the design process to the children, the team demonstrated humility (that their expertise alone was not “enough”), respect (of the expertise and perspectives of the children themselves), and trust (in ceding control of the design process). The influence and value of the children’s participation in co-production is evident in the platform’s design and global impact.

Solution Space - Deliver solutions that work. In contrast to traditional “waterfall” approaches to solution delivery, whereby a design is fully architected upfront and then built in isolation from its intended context of use, a human-centred design delivers solutions through iterative cycles of design, development and user testing. These cycles can starts as early as when a concept is first formed and can continue through the development lifecycle to test solution desirability, feasibility and viability. By taking the minimum viable step to solution delivery before testing, teams can de-risk innovation by reducing the overall investment of effort before validation and reduce the cost of correction.

You connect, nourish and illuminate innovation.

By identifying bright lights, supporting local authorities, and connecting innovators iESEis transforming the local public service system. Your suite of activities and initiatives work in concert to help local authorities fix problems and elevate service delivery. This was made evident by the Innovation Club, the Seeing Is Believing Tours and the Public Sector Transformation Awards. These efforts are highlighting bright spots and shedding light on positive deviancein public service throughout the UK.

The Two Loops Theory of Changeis a model inspired by the cycle of living systems introduced by Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley. Frieze and Wheatley observed: "as one system culminates and starts to collapse, isolated alternatives slowly begin to arise and give way to the new." iESE is identifying, connecting, nourishing and illuminating the public service alternatives in local government. You are doing the critically important work of cultivating new practices and innovation in the shell of the old system.

And that’s why we love you.

With appropriately socially-distanced hugs from Dr Jules and Layman Nick

Read the full article at: https://issuu.com/ksagency.co.uk/docs/transform_new_style_017_municipal_journal_web